My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

  I also read aloud from notes handed to me by the audience—about, say, cuts of hard-won new courses that aren’t yet in the core curriculum, but plenty of money allocated for a new football stadium—because I can do this without punishment. Often a kind of alchemy takes place. When someone on one side of the hall asks a question, and someone on the other side answers it, I know this magic has happened. The group has acquired a life of its own.

  There are rock-bottom subjects for men as well as women. If there is one that men want to talk about most, it’s how much they missed having nurturing fathers, or any man in their lives who cared. Once they delve into that, the question is how to become that father or man themselves. This childhood wish is one of the greatest allies that feminism could have. Men also talk about seeing their mothers treated with violence or humiliation by fathers or stepfathers. I’ve watched the biggest, baddest-looking college athletes with tears rolling down their faces because they were remembering how they felt while witnessing their mothers being beaten.

  Whatever the makeup of the audience, I’ve learned to have faith in the smart, funny, revelatory responses and the surprises of a discussion that usually goes on longer than the lecture itself. I wish I could bring you a thousand YouTube videos of people standing up and asking what they need to know, or sharing what they’ve learned, or telling their stories, or asking for help, or saving me from some impasse I can’t solve.

  A sample:

  · At a law school in Canada, we are deep in a discussion of the law as a universal instrument that feminists should not expect to be flexible. I am arguing that this is what judges are for—otherwise, justice could be meted out by a computer. The mostly male law students are arguing that any exception is dangerous and creates a “slippery slope.” Make one exception, and the number will grow until the law will be overturned de facto.

  I am not a lawyer. I am stuck. Those young men may or may not represent the commonsense majority in the audience, but they have triumphed.

  Then a tall young woman in jeans rises from the back of the room. “Well,” she says calmly, “I have a boa constrictor.” This quiets the audience right down.

  “Once a month,” she continues, “I go to a dissection lab on campus to get frozen mice to feed my boa constrictor. But this month, there was a new professor in charge, and he said to me: ‘I can’t give you frozen mice. If I give you frozen mice, everyone will want frozen mice.’ ”

  There is such an explosion of laughter that even the argumentative young men can’t resist. She has made her point: not everyone wants the same thing. A just law can be flexible. To be just, a law has to be flexible. She has saved the day.

  · At a community college in California, an auditorium full of returning women students is into a long and serious discussion about how difficult it is to get their male partners to share equally in the housework and child care. It’s not just because the men are resistant; it’s because the women themselves feel guilty, or don’t want to seem like nags, or don’t know how to divide work and child care because they’ve never seen it at home.

  One woman rises to speak: “Close your eyes and pretend you are living with a woman—how would you divide the housework?”

  There is a long pause. “Now, don’t lower your standards.” There are cheers of approval.

  · On another campus, some women tell me about men who leave their underwear on the floor and don’t feel compelled to pick it up—or even notice. By now, the shouts and laughter have become quite rowdy, and I’ve begun to worry about a silent young Japanese woman near the front. Perhaps we are offending her.

  As if summoned by my thought, she stands and turns to face all five hundred or so women. “When my husband leaves his underwear on the floor,” she says quietly, “I find it quite useful to nail it to the floor.”

  Amid laughter and cheers, this shy young woman seems surprised to find herself laughing, too. She tells the group this is the first time she has ever said anything in public.

  · In a discussion of the advantages of having younger men as husbands and lovers—because they’re more likely to treat women as equals—one woman rises to say, “Of course they understand better. We were their mothers!” Once again I worry about a much older and ladylike woman in a front row who looks disapproving. When I ask if we are offending her, she rises, turns to the audience, and says, “When you are having an affair with a younger man”—I notice she doesn’t say if, but when—“try never to get on top. You look like a bulldog.” This remark coming from an unlikely woman—but one who had clearly been there—brought down the house.

  —

  IF THERE IS ONE thing that these campus visits have affirmed for me, it’s that the miraculous but impersonal Internet is not enough. As in the abolitionist and suffragist era, when there were only six hundred or so colleges with a hundred students each—and itinerant organizers like the Grimké sisters, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth traveled to speak in town halls, granges, churches, and campgrounds—nothing can replace being in the same space. That’s exactly why we need to keep creating the temporary worlds of meetings, small and large, on campuses and everywhere else. In them, we discover we’re not alone, we learn from one another, and so we keep going toward shared goals. Individual organizers in the civil rights movement had a network of black churches, not just phones and mimeograph machines, and veterans speaking against the war in Vietnam had coffeehouses and rock concerts. Now that there are at least four thousand campuses with more than fifteen million students—not yet diverse enough, but more diverse than ever before—they are the mainstay for wandering organizers like me.

  I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.

  You’ll learn that, say, students and staff and faculty created child care that changed who could go to a college; or that the best-qualified candidate got elected instead of the best-financed one; or that high school students here worked summers to pay the school fees of their counterparts in Africa; or that a governor learned about wrongful convictions, including of women who killed their batterers in self-defense, and commuted the sentences of everyone on death row; or that male executives insisted on parental leave and equal time with their kids; or that an entire state rose up against turning its prisons and public schools into corporate profit centers; or that domestic violence became grounds for firing police and police brutality plummeted; or that a school system ordered texts that covered all the continents and populations equally; or that American history courses actually began when people first populated this land they called Turtle Island; or that gun ownership went down and public transportation went up; or that reproductive freedom became the Fifth Freedom—and other hopes that only you and your future self can imagine.

  Then, as if in answer to a riddle posed years before, you will realize that this growth came from seeds you planted or watered or carried from place to place—and you’ll be rewarded in the way that we as communal beings need most: you’ll know you made a difference.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN PEDIN, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

  WITH BELLA ABZUG, TRYING TO SAY THAT POLITICALLY “WE’RE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT.”

  When the Political Is Personal

  My mother’s stories of suffering during the Depression—and how Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped us out of it—taught me that politics are a part of daily life. She described making soup from leftover potato skins, then listening to Roosevelt’s speeches on the radio to nourish her spirit. Or cutting up a blanket to make a warm coat for my older sister and protecting her from ridicule by saying that if people loved a new kind of First Lady, they could love a new kind of coat. She even told me that my grandfather had died not of pneumonia, as everybody said, but of a broken heart after losing everything he worked for. Had he lived to see Presid
ent Roosevelt create jobs and dignity where they were needed most—by building bridges, planting forests, even painting murals in post offices—she was sure he would be with us still.

  It made perfect sense to me that my mother’s stories began in a personal place, and came to a political point. So did her belief that Franklin and Eleanor understood our lives at the bottom, even though they were born at the top. “Always look at what people do,” as my mother said, “not at who they are.” She also was sure the Roosevelts wanted us to become independent, not dependent. Since, like most children, I said things like “It’s not fair” and “You are not the boss of me,” this idea made me love them even more.

  Not all my mother’s stories had a happy ending. When I saw a mysterious newspaper photo of police dragging dark-skinned people through city streets, she explained there were race riots in nearby Detroit—because the Depression had never ended for people called Negroes. I imagined people making soup from potato peelings and coats from blankets, yet somehow I couldn’t imagine my family being attacked by police. She also sat with me as we listened to a radio drama about a mother and child trying to survive in a place called a concentration camp. I knew my mother didn’t want to frighten me, only to teach me something serious, and this made me feel important and grown-up. In later years, I wondered if she meant such small doses of hard realities to immunize me against the depression that, in her, could be triggered by as little as a sad movie or a hurt animal.

  Yet I never asked why my happy-go-lucky father had zero interest in politics. Both were kind and loving, just very different.

  I was eleven when President Roosevelt died. By then, my mother and I were living in the small town in Massachusetts where we had moved after she and my father separated. I can still see the exact look of the cracks in the sidewalk where I was riding my bike when my mother came out to tell me. It was hard to believe that Franklin and Eleanor would no longer be part of our lives. It was harder still when I realized that not everyone was sorry. Some in that town blamed the president for getting us into World War II, and others thought his idea of a United Nations would just let foreigners tell us what to do. A newspaper cartoon said, “Goodbye to President Rosenfeld.” My mother explained that no, Roosevelt wasn’t Jewish; it was just that prejudiced people linked together things they didn’t like.

  Our only companion in mourning was an elderly man across the street who wore a tie with FDR woven into it, something he showed to us as if to coconspirators. My mother was brave enough to put a black-draped photo of the president in our front window, but not brave enough to explain it to the neighbors. I was beginning to suspect that conflict follows politics as night follows day, yet the mere thought of conflict was enough to depress my already depressed mother. I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be “unfeminine,” so we suppress it—until it overflows.

  I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward an activist place where she herself could never go.

  —

  MY OWN POLITICAL LIFE didn’t begin until my last year in high school. I was living with my sister in Washington, D.C., where she was a buyer in a department store and shared a house with three other young working women. They assumed I must be homesick, and it seemed disloyal to tell the truth. Because I was responsible only for myself, I was in heaven.

  In my new high school, everyone seemed headed for college. Some had even taken the college boards before just for practice, something I’d never heard of. They came from families with bank accounts instead of pay envelopes, dinner parties instead of TV dinners, and vacations in countries my Toledo friends’ families had fled in poverty.

  Many of my new classmates came from high-level military families, and regarded presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower as war hero and father-figure combined. To me Adlai Stevenson, a reluctant candidate drafted by Democrats, sounded more like Roosevelt, but I wasn’t about to argue. I had a handsome new boyfriend who was headed for West Point, the son and grandson of generals. Only by accident did I discover that a makeshift Stevenson for President office was just a streetcar ride away.

  The minute I walked into that big room full of ringing phones and rushing people, I felt it was the most exciting place I’d ever been. Staff members were presiding over cluttered desks, volunteers were talking intensely while stuffing envelopes, and teenagers were stacking lawn signs for nearby Maryland and Virginia, where people could actually vote for president, unlike residents of D.C. who were supposed to be neutral. Most amazing, all this was open to anyone off the street.

  Soon I had a place working alongside other young women volunteers, getting purple ink on our hands while tending a big drumlike mimeograph machine churning out Students for Stevenson. It was a newsletter designed to attract volunteers, since no one under twenty-one could vote.

  I could see there was a clear hierarchy. Male staffers made decisions, and women carried them out, even women old enough to be their mothers. Paid staff were white men, and the few black women and men were volunteers or messengers. Still, this was much more like the real world than my new high school. I spent my first days there trying to figure out why the halls full of students looked so odd. Suddenly I realized that everyone was white. I asked a teacher if this reflected the neighborhood, and he said of course not, it reflected segregation. Washington was two separate cities, he said, and the black majority wanted separate schools, too. Besides, the city had come a long way since slaves built the White House.

  This was news to me. My Toledo high school was segregated socially, too—not only by race but by whose family had a television set, spoke Polish or Hungarian at home, or had a father who was a foreman instead of working the line—but at least we all went to the same classes, ate in the same cafeteria, and cheered the same football team.

  Altogether, this Stevenson for President office was the most open and welcoming place I’d ever been. But one Saturday when I and the other young women arrived, we found ourselves stashed away on an upper floor. We were devastated. A staffer explained that Stevenson himself might drop in and must not be seen with any female unless she was old enough to be his mother. After all, he was that terrible thing—divorced—something no president had ever been. Though everyone seemed to know that Eisenhower had imported the beautiful young English woman who was his driver during the war—and even arranged for her U.S. citizenship—he would have his wife, Mamie, as a proper First Lady. Appearances were all that mattered.

  We didn’t object to being hidden away; we felt like Typhoid Marys who might endanger the cause we cared about. When we went out for ten-cent hamburgers at the local White Castle, we talked about staying out of sight. What we didn’t talk about were the male staffers who rated our looks, brushed against us in close quarters, and became hazards to be navigated. Our presence was the problem; their behavior was inevitable. Avoiding them while keeping their egos intact was just part of our job.

  The truth is that we would have put up with almost anything to stay in this exciting place with its air of fighting for outsiders—even though we didn’t yet know we were outsiders, too. Or to put it another way, we didn’t believe we could ever be insiders. I didn’t know that political change could make me feel safer in the street, or allow me an identity of my own instead of marrying it, or send my Toledo classmates to college instead of to factories, or get my current classmates out of their white ghetto. I didn’t realize that changes made through politics might have helped my mother remain the pioneer journalist she had been years before I was born.

  My only thought was Where else could I find such openness, excitement, and hope? I was hooked.

  And I’ve st
ayed hooked on campaigns to this day. Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself. Campaign season is the only time of public debate about what we want for the future. It can change consciousness even more than who gets elected. In short, campaigns may be the closest thing we have to democracy itself.

  —

  LIVING IN INDIA, where people lined up for hours and even days to cast their ballots, confirmed my oddball love of campaigns. So did returning home to find a growing and brave civil rights movement of people willing to risk their lives to register and vote.

  But as a freelance writer, it was hard to combine what I loved with what I did. If I tried for an assignment covering a major political leader, I would be asked to write about his wife instead. If I worked hard, I could get assignments I was proud of—for instance, a profile of Truman Capote, or a long article about the contraceptive pill—but the world of politics allowed few women into it, even as journalists.

  Then, in 1968, I joined a group of writers—led by Clay Felker, my editor at Esquire—who were starting New York magazine. I was the only “girl reporter,” but finally I would be able to write about politics. This was the home of the New Journalism as practiced by Tom Wolfe, and also of Jimmy Breslin, an in-the-streets chronicler of New York life. Since Wolfe wrote satirically from outside about subjects he probably disliked, and Breslin wrote from inside about the lives of people he probably loved, they helped establish the right of nonfiction writers to be both personal and political—as long as we got our facts straight.1